KOKOPELLI

We have never left the canyon. It was ours ten thousand years before you came, and it will be ours ten thousand years after you are gone. We came when there was no one here. We made it ours by making ourselves a part of it and only we have truly loved this land. It is a bleak land, a dry land, which rejects lovers and stands aloof. It is not a land to be easily loved, and it tests its lovers. It distances itself from those who would love it, and asks for proofs of that love. And then it asks again, and yet again for those pledges of devotion. We, who you call the Anasazi, or the ancient ones, in our ceremonies, in our rituals, in our trials and sacrifices, attempted always to show our devotion to the land. But it demands so much as to make lovers into haters, and then it whimsically rewards the lovers with beauty and plenty, and rekindles the love that had become hatred, creating a yet deeper reverence and awe, and capturing the soul of the helpless worshipers. That is why we are still here. We are in the land, we are of the land, we are the land. You build your roads on top of our land. You place signs and markers, and tell the tourists about our land. You explain our people in your pamphlets, your books, your tour guides, even in motion pictures and videotapes. Your campers pitch their tents, park their pickups, build their fires, and try to understand our land and our people. They climb our cliffs, gaze at our mesas, photograph our walls; they peer into our kivas and homes, and then they say they know about us. You think we are gone, but we, the ancient ones, are still here. Our spirits are in the rooms and kivas. We still walk the roadways not your roadways but ours. In the nights we are on the mesa tops, watching the stars. During the cool of early morning we are in the corn patches, tending the crops. On the winter nights we are warming ourselves at the hearths, under the plaza, watching the smoke drift out the overhead openings. On that one day of the year when the sun goes all the way to the north, we sing the old songs for the crops. Sometimes as I sit invisibly in the old kiva, and the tourists climb down to take their pictures, one will sit beside me. He will look up at the walls as they are, but he will see them as they were. There will be crossbeams and laths and brush and dirt; there will be a roof where no roof has been for eight hundred years. The crumbling walls will have a fresh coating of plaster, ready for the ceremony of the corn. He will know about the land and love the land as we love the land, and sometimes I think he knows I am there. He does not see me but I sense that he is aware of my spirit; of all our spirits. It is for him that I tell our story. In his thoughts I have felt the questions. He knows of our land and he knows of our people. He is not a professor, classifying the fragments we abandoned, nor is he a student, sifting the sands for answers that will never be found in the sands. Yes, he has read the facts and the guesses, he has studied the pottery we left behind, he has gazed at the buildings we left crumbling in the canyon, he has climbed our cliffs and walked our ancient roads. But that is not why I will answer his questions. He has also sat alone on our mesa tops and contemplated the skeletons of our cities of stone below, and in his eyesight have materialized our people as they once were. In his imaginings he has felt the cold we felt in winter, he has burned with us in the withering sun of summer. He has known our hunger in the bad years when the crops wouldn’t grow, and feasted with us in the good years, when the clay pots were full. He has walked the trails we walked, and felt the fears we felt, and now he wants to know why we are only spirits, roaming the canyon which was once our home. It is for him that I tell our story. If I were able I would take him by the hand, and lead him back among the ruins. We would not start at the big towns; we would go north up the canyon to the old town, the most ancient town. We would sit together and face the wall of pictures, and I would then show him how to read our story in the rocks. And we would go in the early morning to the sacred kiva on the west side, and we would watch the ceremony of daybreak. I would call out all the other spirits so that he too could see them, and we would once again see the miracle of the sun. I would take him to the high pueblo where he could face in the direction of the gods, and show him the smoke on the horizon. We would go south to the homes of our ancestors and we would speak with them also. We would follow the roads to all parts of our empire, and he would understand what we once were. I would tell him about The People. I would take him back to the beginnings to see our ancestors, and he would know why we were once great. I would lead him through the generations, and of the great men and the gods, and the reasons why we were strong. I would show him the pit houses and take him into the ancient caves. We would walk in the paths of the mammoth and the camel, and would see the huge herds as they roamed beside the melting walls of ice. He would carry a spear as our fathers carried their spears, and he would make the fine stone points as our grandfathers made them from the glassy rock. All these things would I show him, that he would know of The People. All these things would I do if I were able. But, as I may not take him on this journey, only my thoughts will cross the centuries. I will tell him our story, the story of The People. I ask our gods to help me, so that he will understand.